Sex and Death: Stories - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770898832 ISBN 13: 9781770898837

Publisher: House of Anansi Pr, 2016

Synopsis

“What else is there?” — Alice Munro, on why so much of her work deals with the twin themes of sex and death.

The drive for life — for survival and reproduction — and the drive for death — for violence and self-destruction — are the two dominant, instinctive urges of human behaviour. These conflicting compulsions, characterized by Freud as Eros and Thanatos, are also the central themes of great literature. In Sex and Death, some of today’s most compelling writers from around the globe — Kevin Barry, Lynn Coady, Robert Drewe, Ceridwen Dovey, Damon Galgut, Petina Gappah, Sarah Hall, Peter Hobbs, Yiyun Li, Alexander MacLeod, Ben Marcus, Jon McGregor, Guadalupe Nettel, Courttia Newland, Taiye Selassie, Ali Smith, Wells Tower, Alan Warner, Claire Vaye Watkins, Clare Wigfall — explore these challenging themes with honesty, psychological acuity, brutality, tenderness, and empathy, in stories that are illuminating, disquieting, funny, and utterly dazzling.

About this title

From the Back Cover

How we come in, and how we go out, sex and death: these are the governing drives, our two greatest themes.

In this provocative, haunting, and sexy collection of short stories, a group of acclaimed writers from across the globe probes the nature of, and connection between, two of the most powerful, exhilarating, and terrifying forces that define and shape the human experience: sex and death.

Here we see the events that mark the lives of the young and old, of men and women, of those meeting only briefly and others reflecting on shared pasts.

In these intense, often traumatic, and sometimes humorous interactions, we are confronted not just with our urges and anxieties, but with the very limits of mortality and morbidity. Honest, compassionate, and psychologically astute, the stories in Sex and Death are daring in their approaches to the form and relentless in their pursuit of what it is to be human.

Kevin Barry · Lynn Coady · Ceridwen Dovey · Robert Drewe · Damon Galgut · Petina Gappah · Sarah Hall · Peter Hobbs · Yiyun Li · Alexander MacLeod · Ben Marcus · Jon McGregor · Guadalupe Nettel · Courttia Newland · Taiye Selasi · Ali Smith · Wells Tower · Alan Warner · Claire Vaye Watkins · Clare Wigfall

About the Author

SARAH HALL is the author of the novels Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, Daughters of the North, How To Paint A Dead Man, and The Wolf Border. She has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, a Betty Trask Award, a Lakeland Book of the Year prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award and the Portico Prize for Fiction, and her novels have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and Arthur C. Clarke Award, and longlisted for the Orange Prize and the Dublin IMPAC Award. Her first collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference, won the Portico Prize for Fiction 2012 and the Edge Hill short story prize, and was also short-listed for the Frank O’Connor Prize. She lives in Norwich, UK.

PETER HOBBS is the author of two novels, The Short Day Dying and In The Orchard, The Swallows, as well as a collection of short stories, I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train. His work has won a Betty Trask Award, and been shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the John Lewellyn Rhys Prize, and the Whitbread First Novel Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a writer-in-residence for the schools literacy charity, First Story. He lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: House of Anansi Pr
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1770898832
• ISBN 13: 9781770898837
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Hall Sarah, Hobbs Peter